The distance from Hughes Stadium to the Colorado State University campus is only about 4 miles, but to hear some school officials talk, it's an impassable gulf for alumni and one of the biggest detriments to the university taking its rightful place as a world-class institution.

But the university officials planning the drive to raise $250 million to build an on-campus stadium say they can parlay fundraising for a marquee sports program into donor dollars for academics and research, as other top football schools have done.

"They may go to the football game, but they won't come back over here," said Brett Anderson, the school's vice president for advancement. "If they're already on campus, they're a captive audience. If I can get them here, show them the facilities, they give at a much higher rate than they would otherwise. And this is a venue that will do that for us."

The venue Anderson is referring to is the proposed 42,000-seat, on-campus stadium that CSU president Tony Frank recently recommended be built. The school's Board of Governors voted unanimously to proceed with the project, which would replace the primitive Hughes Stadium west of campus, provided that half the cost is raised through private funding within the next two years.

Since that vote this month, officials have been contemplating exactly what shape the fundraising campaign will take. And while the final plan isn't expected to be finished for another two weeks, Anderson said he's "very confident we can do this."

"We had a lot of naysayers when we embarked on a capital campaign seven years ago," Anderson added. "We set a goal of $500 million, and we hit that early and in arguably the worst economic downturn in our lifetime."

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That campaign, which was completed in June, was strictly focused on academics. During the lead-up to the stadium vote, some members of the board wondered whether endorsing the project would be making a statement that athletics was somehow taking priority over the classroom or research.

New university Chancellor Michael Martin, who previously worked at college football powerhouses Florida and Louisiana State, argued to the contrary. The new stadium could help enhance the academic mission, he argued.

"If you're clever, you can reach well beyond football, and I can't tell you how much that's worth," he said. "There is a passion for a place that a big-time athletic program can drive. I have come to understand the value of it, and the value of assembling large numbers of people on campus even for a few weekends a year, (during) which you can really sell the rest of the campus."

Anderson said just the possibility of the stadium had created inroads with potential donors, giving an example of an alum who hadn't contributed a dime in 27 years coming forth because of the project.

"And even if it's not the stadium, we can connect on the bigger picture," he said. "If they're at the school, they may say, 'I don't want to give to football, but I just saw the lasers being used by the engineering department, and it's really cool — I'll give to that.' "

Martin said people who give to athletics often give greater sums to the school's academic side.

From that standpoint, CSU might be wise to study what took place at another one of Martin's old haunts, the University of Minnesota.

The last major college to build a new on-campus stadium, Minnesota opened its TCF Bank Stadium just over three years ago, a 51,000-seat structure that cost $288 million. During its fundraising campaign, one of the major points of emphasis was making sure that academic concerns weren't overlooked, said former university president Robert Bruininks.

"Academics has to be the bedrock principle in framing the discussion with the public and the university community, especially in these times when states are cutting budgets and schools are raising tuitions," Bruininks said. "It wasn't an actual condition, but we tried every step of the way to leverage academics with the stadium. The issue of how you make that connection is crucial."

Bruininks said he knew he was on the right track when the school's alumni association told him it was willing to make a $1 million donation toward the stadium, but he told them he wouldn't accept it unless the association made a sizable gift for academics.

He feared it would renege on the offer when it asked for an adjournment, but he was relieved when he found out that the discussion focused on whether the alums were going to give an additional $500,000 or $1 million to the academic side.

Similarly, when the university pitched local corporate giant Target about the stadium, the company balked at the amount being asked for; a compromise was reached, however, in which $2 million went to the stadium and another $2 million to an art museum on campus.

In the end, Bruininks said, with the assistance of a state matching program, there was $90 million given in donations for the stadium — and another $70 million for academics that was a direct result of the stadium campaign.

Three years later, the tie-in is still strong, with academic donations a major consideration for season-ticket locations for the school's most popular sports: football, basketball and hockey.

"People said we weren't doing it the right way, that if you want to build a children's hospital, you build a children's hospital and not confuse people by asking about other stuff," Bruininks said. "We operated in a way that challenged that assumption. There were a lot of ingredients and a lot of moving parts, and everything had to fall just right, but we did succeed."

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